Hack-a-thon

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Welcome to Aaron Menke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of iHeartRadio and Grim and Mild.

Our world is full of the unexplainable.

And if history is an open book, All of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore.

Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.

Today we take the stock market as a given.

Every developed nation has one and anyone with extra cash sees it as a good idea to invest.

It allows startup companies to grow quickly and it allows the middle class to have a retirement fund.

But at the end of the day, it's all about perceived value, how much the market, aka human beings, thinks something is worth.

And when that perceived value proves to be way off from the actual value of a stock, well then we call that a bubble.

One of the first examples of this happened over 300 years ago.

And when it burst, it almost took all of England with it.

In the early 1700s, England already wasn't doing so great.

The monarchs of Europe conducted wars like they were a regular part of doing business and England had racked up quite a bit of debt from all the fighting.

On top of all of this, there was still quite a bit of fighting over the English monarchy itself.

Politician John Aislaby, along with several of his fellow politicians, formed a committee to address the national debt.

At first, they conducted several lotteries, just like the ones we have today, where participants pay a small amount on the tiny chance that they'll win a huge sum.

The government takes some of the profits and then uses them how it sees fit, such as paying off the national debt.

But this was too slow a solution for England's significant financial woes.

And so the politicians turned to another scheme.

You see, large private banks were a relatively new development in England.

They were sometimes still called companies back then.

And it was around this time that members of parliament decided to create a company of their own, the South Sea Company, which would take advantage of a new peace agreement signed with Spain in 1713.

And what would their investment be?

Well, human trafficking.

The company purchased an agreement from the English crown granting them exclusive rights to the slave slave trade with Spanish colonies in Central and South America.

They expected this to be hugely profitable, and so they would sell shares in the company in order to consolidate the national debt.

In other words, they paid investors, who England was indebted to, with shares in the South Sea Company, promising them shares that would grow in value over time.

To be even more clear here, Parliament was betting the entire national debt on their ability to sell human beings to Spain.

They were very literally putting the country's burden on the backs of African slaves.

It was a new wrinkle in a centuries-long pattern of horrific abuse.

The members of parliament were so lacking in empathy that they didn't see anything wrong with paying off the debt from endless, pointless wars by transferring it to the labor of innocent Africans who had nothing to do with any of it.

Over the next few years, they managed to sell around 30,000 enslaved people to the Spanish, which is already an incomprehensible amount of pain and suffering.

And yet, despite all all of that, it wasn't actually enough to make the company profitable.

You see, Spain limited England to just one ship a year, and when that ship arrived in the New World, the human traffickers were often met with bureaucracy and logistical difficulties that kept them from turning a profit.

And so, the South Sea Company was a failure.

But no one seemed willing to admit it.

The company had practically become a money printing machine.

People from all over Europe and all social classes invested their money and used their their shares to inflate their own wealth.

And that's when John Aislaby, the English politician first tasked with eliminating the debt, joined with other politicians to make the problem even worse.

They proposed a new scheme to Parliament to have the South Sea Company take over even more of the national debt.

They wanted to inflate their own wealth by inflating the stock price of the company.

And people went along with it for a few reasons.

For one, many of the members of parliament were bribed by Aislaby and his cohorts.

And for another, Aislaby had made King George the first honorary governor of the company, giving everyone false confidence.

By spring of 1720, the stock price for the South Sea Company had inflated to an incredibly high number.

But by September, investors began to realize how worthless the stock really was.

The bubble burst, and the price of the stock plummeted.

Many members of the nobility lost a substantial amount of their wealth.

Some even took their own lives as a result.

And there were other consequences as well.

Azlabi was imprisoned, but only for five months.

Of course, the king was held blameless in all of this.

He was the first monarch of the Hanover dynasty, a stable line that had persisted all the way to the modern day.

Parliament wasn't going to risk another civil war by calling him into question.

So, what does it all mean for us?

Well, it goes to show how disastrous it can be when politicians and financiers neglect their responsibility to the public.

And it showcases the curious tendency of humans to fall victim to a herd mentality, continuing to invest in something they know is worthless.

It seems that whether you are a peasant or a king, no one is immune to the lure of a get-rich quick scheme.

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Banking with Capital One helps you keep more money in your wallet with no fees or minimums on checking accounts and no overdraft fees.

Just ask the Capital One Bank guy.

It's pretty much all he talks about.

In a good way.

He'd also tell you that this podcast is his favorite podcast, too.

Aw, really?

Thanks, Capital One Bank Guy.

What's in your wallet?

Terms apply.

See capital one.com/slash bank.

Capital One NA member FDIC.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT, is known for a lot of things.

World-class professors, cutting-edge technology, and some of the best science, engineering, and mathematics programs in the world.

Want to go to space, or the depths of the ocean, or get inside an atom?

Then MIT is the place to be.

But aside from its academics, MIT is also known for another characteristic.

With world-class students come world-class pranks.

Called hacks by the student body, they range from the whimsical to the wild.

Many hacks include the Great Dome, a neoclassical building topped by, of course, a very large dome.

Over the years, a fire truck, a lunar lander, and an MIT campus police car have all made their way onto the top of the building.

Other hacks are lighthearted, like how in 2007, MIT MIT students dressed the statue of their rival Harvard University's founder in armor from the Halo video game series.

And sometimes they can get downright dangerous, like how in the 1930s, five MIT students set off thermite bombs under a Boston streetcar, welding the wheels to the rails.

Notably, one of those pranksters later became an MIT dean.

Perhaps the most famous hack at MIT, though, began as a fraternity hazing ritual and left a lasting mark on the school.

It was a cool October night in 1958 when seven Lambda Chi Alpha pledges arrived at the Harvard Bridge armed with chalk.

They were there for a simple task, to put down markers along the half-mile overpass that spanned the Charles River from Cambridge to Boston.

The whole thing was their pledgemaster's idea.

He, like many MIT students, lived in Boston proper.

Nearly every day, he had crossed the bridge to get to the MIT campus in Cambridge.

He wanted the markers so that he could easily see how far he had left to walk, but he didn't want them to measure in feet or yards.

Instead, they would measure in smoots.

What exactly is a smoot?

Well, a smoot is a person, Oliver Smoot, to be exact.

Oliver was one of the pledges that year, and as the shortest member of the group at 5'7 inches tall, the pledgemaster chose him to make measuring the bridge more labor-intensive.

On top of that, he reasoned Smoot's name sounded scientific.

An ampere measures electrical current, a watt total power, and a smoot distance across the Harvard Bridge.

So that evening, the seven pledges set out to measure the bridge.

They had Oliver Smoot lay down, mark the length of his body, and then moved on.

And at first, Smoot was jumping up and moving on to the next spot on his own, but as the Smoot lengths reached into the hundreds, he grew too tired to do that.

His brothers started picking him up and carrying him to the next chalk mark.

Partway through, the brothers brothers were forced to run off the bridge and hide when a Boston police car rolled by.

Once the police lost interest, they returned to their task.

After over an hour and a half, the brothers made their final chalk mark at Smoot's feet.

Together, they found that the Harvard Bridge stretched 364.4 Smoots long, plus or minus one ear.

Now, even though the measurement known as Smoots originated as a fraternity prank, over the years they became part of the city.

Lamba Chi Alpha repaints the smoot marks every year.

When the bridge was rebuilt in the 1980s, the contractor added smoot marks to the sidewalk.

And today, you can convert any distance on the Google calculator into smoots.

As for Oliver himself, his foray into measurement marked the beginning of a career.

He became head of the International Organization of Standardization, which is the group that sets standard measurements for scientific research.

With each new hack, MIT students hope to make their mark on history.

But after nearly 70 years, none quite measure up to Oliver Smoot.

I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities.

Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts or learn more about the show by visiting CuriositiesPodcast.com.

This show was created by me, Aaron Mankey, in partnership with How Stuff Works.

I make another award-winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show.

And you can learn all about it over at theworldoflore.com.

And until next time, stay curious.

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